Buried Alive: Inside the 19th-Century Panic Over Premature Burial

A year before his 1896 death, Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel signed his last will and testament, bequeathing the bulk of his fortune to fund the Nobel Prizes. Buried at the bottom of the document, however, was a morbid final request: “It is my express wish that following my death, my arteries be severed, and when this has been done and competent doctors have confirmed clear signs of death, my remains be incinerated in a crematorium.”

Nobel’s prescribed postmortem bloodletting might sound bizarre, but it revealed a deeper fear that gripped many in the 1800s: being buried alive. Throughout that century, chilling stories of people awakening in their coffins regularly appeared in newspapers and filled the pages of Gothic fiction. One 1895 study by Reverend J. G. Ouseley claimed at least 2,700 people a year were mistakenly buried in England and Wales. In the 1837 book The Danger of Premature Burials, Hyacinthe Le Guern estimated that four people a day in France met the same grim fate.

“There was an obsession in the late 18th and early 19th centuries with the bizarre and horrific—hence the parallel rise in interest in Gothic literature,” says Roger Byard, a forensic pathologist and emeritus professor at the University of Adelaide. “And the media has always thrived on the macabre.”

Though most 19th-century tales of premature burial were undoubtedly fictitious—Edgar Allan Poe, in particular, could not resist the theme—the fear behind them was genuine. By 1891, Italian psychiatrist Enrico Morselli had given that fear a clinical name—taphophobia (sometimes spelled taphephobia), from the Greek words for “grave” and “fear.”

Before modern medicine, the border between life and death was frighteningly blurry. “Bodies showing no signs of life are assumed to be dead, but this is not always the case,” writes Christine Quigley in The Corpse: A History. People suffering from conditions such as catalepsy, apoplexy or hypothermia could slip into states of suspended animation that perfectly mimicked death.

Into the 1800s, many of the newly deceased were buried without ever being examined by a doctor. Even when physicians were present, their methods were primitive. To detect signs of life, doctors typically looked for signs of breath rather than a pulse—sometimes holding a mirror or glass beneath the nostrils to see if it fogged.

Some tried more hands-on approaches—tickling patients with feathers or applying sneezing powder. Others resorted to more painful techniques such as sticking needles under toenails, applying red-hot pieces of iron to the skin or even employing purpose-built machines to rhythmically tug a patient’s tongue for hours.

“With the lack of medical training, the public feared that if they should go unconscious or in a coma, the ... professionals would say that they were dead when they weren’t,” says Bob Boetticher Sr., chairman of the National Museum of Funeral History and lead funeral director for the state funerals of four U.S. presidents. “This fear just wasn’t in England or the United States. It was worldwide.”

The dread of being buried alive grew into a full-blown cultural fixation in the late 18th and 19th centuries, driven by pandemics, a sensationalist press, skepticism toward emerging science and a Victorian fascination with death. Newspapers stoked the hysteria with lurid stories of muffled cries rising from fresh graves, coffins clawed from within and skeletons discovered huddled inside tomb entrances.

Fiction authors both reflected and fueled the fear. Edgar Allan Poe explored the terror in short stories including “Berenice” (1835), “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), “The Premature Burial” (1844) and “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846). Mary Shelley’s Gothic novel Frankenstein played on a related anxiety—the reanimation of the dead.

The fear preoccupied even the famous. On his deathbed in 1799, George Washington instructed his secretary, “Do not let my body be put into the vault in less than three days after I am dead.” Hans Christian Andersen kept a note by his bed reading, “I only appear to be dead,” and begged his wife to cut his veins after his final breath, to be certain. The pianist Frédéric Chopin reportedly wrote before his death, “The earth is suffocating. Swear to make them cut me open, so I won’t be buried alive.”

The most reliable method to confirm death in the 1800s was to delay burial until a body started to decay. In Europe, families paid to store corpses in “waiting mortuaries,” where attendants watched for days or weeks until clear signs of putrefaction could be seen—or smelled. In Paris, the city morgue became a morbid attraction, where crowds peered through large glass windows at decomposing corpses.

As fear intensified, inventors rushed to capitalize on it. Dozens patented so-called “safety coffins,” devices that promised an escape route for the prematurely buried. Some came with breathing tubes, signaling devices or quick-release lids. In Germany alone, more than 30 safety coffin designs received patents in the latter 1800s.

In 1843, Baltimore musical instrument manufacturer Christian Henry Eisenbrandt patented a “life-preserving coffin” with a lid that sprang open at the slightest movement. The casket’s safety feature, of course, was useless once buried underground.

Franz Vester’s later design offered a more dramatic safeguard: a cord tied to the limbs and neck of a body, connected to an aboveground bell or flag. If the “corpse” moved, rescuers would be alerted—though shifting during decomposition sometimes triggered false alarms. An elaborate 1885 design by Charles Sieber and Frederick Borntraeger added a battery-powered alarm, an air pump and a flag-raising device—all tragically untested.

“None of the coffin inventors who applied for patents were in the funeral business,” says Boetticher. “There’s no proven history that any of these devices were ever used or ever saved somebody who was buried alive.”

The panic endured into the 1890s. In 1896, businessman William Tebb co-founded the London Association for the Prevention of Premature Burial and co-authored Premature Burial and How It May Be Prevented, a 400-page tome that documented scores of supposed live burials. Tebb also proposed diagnostic tools including electric shock treatments and morphine injections.

But as the 20th century dawned, modern medicine and technology began to quiet the collective terror. Hospitals replaced home deaths, physicians learned to detect even the faintest heartbeat and tools like the stethoscope brought certainty where guesswork once reigned. The advent of embalming, too, left no room for error. If a person wasn’t dead before, they certainly were afterward.

“People began to realize that cases of being buried alive were very rare, particularly with improvements in medicine in diagnosing death and with doctors being routinely called upon to formally certify death,” Byard says. “Plus, the 20th century ushered in the era of rationalism and the use of scientific reasoning, so there was a concerted effort to leave behind some—but not all—of the myths of the past.”